Schema.org with Google, Bing, Yahoo !, and Yandex
Since you asked this question, Microformat hRecipe was updated using microformats2 as an h-recipe , but otherwise your question remains relevant and should be answered more than 6 years later.
... how do search engines handle each ...?
The search engine giants, Google, Microsoft (Bing) and Yahoo !, together with Yandex (a popular search engine in Russia and other countries of the world) collaborated to create Schema.org and the schemes in it.
This collaboration is the biggest difference between Schema.org and Microformats; he is likely to continue to influence how everyone views patterns defined by other parties.
You can read about why they created it and how they relate to other formats in the Schema.org FAQ .
In particular, you might be interested in their answers to ...
... which one is better to implement, both from a long-term point of view and from an SEO point of view?
The scheme that is best implemented is the one that has the most support; in this case, this is apparently a recipe for Schema.org . Although all of the aforementioned search engines still support microformats, references to this have disappeared from some official Google documents regarding structured data and extended snippets.
Interestingly, Google recommends a new syntax for structured data called JSON-LD .
JSON-LD: the future of structured data?
In the long run, you might consider using the popular JSON-LD markup syntax with the Schema.org Recipe scheme, which even Bing supports ( examples are shown here ), even though their documentation doesn't mention it.
Interesting Pinterest support
The popular Pinterest content discovery platform supports both schemes and even supports the new JSON-LD syntax (although this is not explicitly mentioned in their documentation).
Despite the growing popularity and adoption of Schema.org, Pinterest seems to offer more support for the h-recipe microformat, including e-instructions
as a supported class, while the corresponding recipeInstructions
Schema.org property is not supported.
It is not clear whether this is a deliberate or even the scheme that they actually prefer, but it is worth bearing in mind if you intend to specifically develop this platform.